Vrbo (vacation rental by owner) web scraping project
Project GitHub | LinkedIn: Niki Moritz Hao-Wei Matthew Oren
The skills we demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.
Introduction
For my web scraping project, I decided to scrap a website named Vrbo for renting places to people when they are on vacation. Vacation Rental By Owner(Vrbo) is a site that allows you to find rentals of all kinds of choices for your vacation, including houses, apartments, condos, villas, etc. It was originally found in 1995, and then got bought by HomeAway in 2006. Its function is very similar to Airbnb; however, the owner can only rent the entire home unit on Vrbo which makes it less popular compare to Airbnb. But if you are sick of sharing spaces with strangers or spend tons of money in the hotel, tired of bringing lots of items to camping, Vrbo could be a very good choice. I enjoy camping in New Jersey when the Summer comes, for the past couple of years, I used to camp in the outdoor field. However, cooking and showering experiences in the wild were not comfortable. Last year, I decided to rent a place where I can enjoy the natural but also can let you feel home. I did my research on many websites, including Airbnb, Vrbo, HomeAway. After considering all of the factors, I decided to rent a place on Vrbo. I have to say it was a satisfied choice.
Data
I used the library from Python called Scrapy to create a spider to help me gather the data from Vrbo.com, such as type, price, location(state), the number of people sleep in the place, the number of bedrooms in the place , number of bathrooms in the place, the number of reviews, and reviews, etc. I want to use this data to find the relationship between them and the price of the house on Vrbo.
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